Marla Brown Fogelman
By Marla Brown Fogelman
-
Life Learning to Love Christmas, Eggnog and All
Photograph via Flickr/Creative Commons As an Orthodox Jew who believes in the world to come while participating pretty fully in the world at large, I will admit that there are certain things I like about Christmas aka “the holiday season.” I like the festive spirit, the Starbucks sweet and spicy Christmas blend coffee, and the…
-
News Let’s Do Coffee, Cousin Carrie
Although writer and actress Carrie Fisher and I have never met, we are related in that four-degrees-of-separation way that many Jews and half-Jews are — that is, my maternal great-aunt was married to her paternal great-uncle. I doubt that Ms. Fisher ever knew Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Jack, who are long deceased, and I only…
-
News Sundays With ‘Jack,’ Bernie, Harvey and More
As we sit in a music classroom in an independent-assisted living facility in Silver Spring, Md., Jerome “Jack” Bluestein and I talk about Hitler. Or, more specifically, about the “Adolf Hitler” photo album that Bluestein has kept with him for the past 60-plus years. The book was known as a cigarette photo album because it…
-
Life My Grandmother’s Obsession Becomes My Own
It was because of my late grandmother and her 40-year obsession with a book called “The Prophet of San Nicandro” that I was sitting at Columbia University’s Café 212, in the middle of a bone-chilling December afternoon, having coffee with professor John Davis. Davis, who holds the chair in Modern Italian History at the University…
-
Books The Curious Case of the San Nicandro Converts
In a new book, “The Jews of San Nicandro,” author John Davis, the chair in Modern Italian History at the University of Connecticut, sheds light on the little-known but highly curious tale of how a community of Italian Catholic peasants came to embrace Judaism during the rise of Fascism and the Second World War. Using…
-
Culture Italian Hilltop Conversion
The Jews of San Nicandro John Davis Yale University Press, 256 pages, $30 In a remote southern Italian town in the 1930s, a group of Catholics who had never before met any Jews began practicing their own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism. Helmed by a disabled and charismatic WWI veteran named Donato Manduzio, who fancied himself…
-
News A Wedding Gift for Mom
It?s five months before my 48-year-old, tree-hugging, hippie sister?s wedding, and my mother and I are in my girlhood bedroom in Wilmington, Del., talking about tradition, family and, most important, bridal wear. ?People ask me what Beth is going to be wearing, but I don?t know,? Mom says, as she smoothes plastic over her mother-of-the-bride…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV ‘Bojack Horseman’ creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg on his new, ‘unapologetically Jewish’ family affair
- 2
News ADL chief attacks Zohran Mamdani, but gets his facts wrong
- 3
News Meet the Jewish senator emerging as Chuck Schumer’s heir apparent
- 4
Culture The Kennedy Center canceled its ‘woke’ programming — so why is this Jewish musical OK?
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion When Jewish migrants were trapped and terrified in Florida — like Alligator Alcatraz inmates today
-
Opinion Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian come straight from the Nazi playbook
-
Fast Forward As NYC mayoral race heats up, a Jewish school is now requiring parents to show proof of voter registration
-
Fast Forward World Zionist Congress lifts ban on Betar USA head, permitting him to serve as a delegate
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
